Description

In The Making of the President 1972, the fourth volume of narrative history of American politics in action, Theodore H. White brings his defining quartet of campaign narratives to a surprising and riveting close. The consummate journalist, White chronicles both the Democratic and the Republican parties as they jockeyed for position toward the end of Richard M. Nixon s turbulent first term. He illuminates the cinematic moments that shaped the campaign the attempt on George Wallace s life, Edmund Muskie crying in the snow in New Hampshire, the swift rise and fall of Tom Eagleton, and the ongoing anguish of Vietnam leading inexorably to a second chaotic collapse among the Democrats and a landslide victory for Nixon. Yet even as the president s highest ambitions were confirmed, White watches aghast as the new Nixon of 1968 is eclipsed by the corrupt Nixon of old a Shakespearean conclusion to an astonishing political epoch."show more